CHICAGO — Mazie Hirono served four years alongside Kamala Harris in the U.S. Senate, and she likes to tell the story of how she, Harris and Cory Booker bonded on the Senate Judiciary Committee — so much so that Harris named the threesome the POCs for “persons of color.”

The trio sat together so often that a constituent once called Hirono’s office and asked if someone made them sit like that.

“I miss Kamala to this day, and I consider her a friend,” Hirono said, adding that the Democratic presidential nominee has a fighting spirit that she brings to the campaign not for herself, but for others. “That’s why I so much support Kamala and her fight for our freedoms and our democracy.”

Hirono pointed to last year’s decision by a conservative Supreme Court overturning Roe v. Wade as an example of the high stakes involved.

She recalled the 2018 confirmation hearings for Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh and how she and Harris shared a disgust over how Kavanaugh simply did not understand why it’s fundamental that a woman have sole control of her body.

“And we looked at each other and we got up and we walked out and we held an impromptu press conference right there with our concerns,” she told fellow Hawaii Democrats Wednesday in Chicago.

While much of the political rhetoric at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago this week coming from the party warns of an existential threat to democracy if Donald Trump is reelected, many Hawaii delegates are genuinely excited about what a Harris presidency could mean for the Aloha State.

There’s an expectation that Harris would not only provide continuity on Biden administration priorities like climate change, upgrading infrastructure and protecting civil rights, but that her ties to leaders like Hirono could benefit the islands.

Support For Maui

Maui has received billions of dollars in federal aid for recovery efforts after the Aug. 8, 2023, wildfires that destroyed much of Lahaina and killed at least 102 people. President Joe Biden and his wife, Jill, flew to the Valley Isle and toured the main disaster zone in the aftermath. Harris also pledged support.

“The bottom line is Harris is absolutely familiar with our needs, with our challenges, but with the opportunities that we see as well,” U.S. Rep. Jill Tokuda said Monday in an interview at a concert in Chicago to support Maui wildfire recovery efforts.

“She’s no stranger to what happened on Maui,” Tokuda said, referring to the conflagration. “Within days, she called us. She talked to us. ‘What can we do? How can we help?’ I was in contact with her team.”

Democratic hopes for a Harris presidency extend beyond domestic policy.

“I just came back from Taiwan,” said Tokuda. “Peace in the Indo-Pacific is good for Hawaii. And (Harris) has been in the middle of the trilateral conversations that have been going on between the United States and Japan, the Philippines and Korea. There is a real desire that those kinds of conversations continue to really create that stability that we need.”

Opposition Over Gaza

Hawaii is a Democratic state, but members of the party are not always united in their politics and policy. One issue proving particularly divisive this summer has been the Biden-Harris administration’s support for Israel’s war against Hamas in Gaza. Tens of thousands of Palestinians have been killed after the Islamic militant group attacked Israel on Oct. 7, killing or taking hostage hundreds of people.

When Gov. Josh Green officially cast the state’s votes during the ceremonial roll call Tuesday at the United Center, 23 went to Harris but six others voted “present” as a protest against support for Israel.

Jun Shin, an alternative uncommitted delegate at the DNC, said he understands how important it is to maintain channels between the White House and Hawaii. He, too, shares general party views such as supporting the rights of workers.

Still, while Shin wants to see Trump lose, he is worried that his wish for a major change on U.S. policy toward Israel — namely, an arms embargo — has gained little traction at the DNC, in spite of ongoing protests in Chicago. But he holds hope that Harris might be open to listening to the concerns about the endless suffering of Palestinians should she make it to the White House.

On core Democratic Party issues such as workers’ rights, however, Harris and Hawaii share passionate agreement, supporters say.

Infrastructure Woes

Like all states, Hawaii has benefited from the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, the Inflation Reduction Act and the American Rescue Plan during the Biden-Harris years. Not all of the legislation was supported by Republicans in Congress, but there were some GOP votes. Nineteen Republicans including Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell voted in favor of the bipartisan infrastructure act, for example.

That legislation and other measures continue to benefit Hawaii workers, said Kalani Werner, a Harris delegate from Hawaii who is also state director for United Public Workers.

Werner said the Biden-Harris administration has been very friendly on labor issues.

“We have a national labor board that’s very favorable towards the unions,” he said Monday in an interview. “But for all the groundwork which they laid going into this new foundation, it also looks very beautiful for us on a national level and a local level.”

By “beautiful,” Werner means jobs and steady work from the feds that employs not just public sector unions like UPW but private sector ones and workers in trade associations.

Werner cited wastewater treatment plants as beneficiaries of federal largesse.

“We have wastewater plants on each of the islands that are sort of dated and aged that need to be updated,” he said. “That’s something my local and my international (AFSCME International) has been pushing for. We rely so much on tourism, and if our beaches were ever to be damaged bad by wastewater spill, we will feel the effects of Covid all over again.”

Then there are backyard issues — literally.

Honolulu City Council member Tyler Dos Santos-Tam stressed the importance of small projects that have benefited from federal support during the Biden administration. He singled out the renovation of a small wooden bridge in Kalihi Valley that was one of his campaign stops in 2022.

“It’s literally a one-lane wooden bridge, and they’ve been wanting to improve it to make it safe for the few homes that are at the end there,” he recalled. “That kind of renovation of that bridge, those kind of improvements, wouldn’t happen without federal funding.”

Delegate Michael Golojuch Jr., a leader in the local Democratic Party’s LGBTQ+ caucus, said a Harris-led administration would support the need for ensuring gender-affirming care at the local and federal level.

“We need to make sure that that is a protected right for everybody, no matter what state they’re in,” he said Wednesday. “The concern in Hawaii is that we’d have outside forces coming in from, like, Florida.”

Just last year, a federal judge ruled Florida’s 2023 law banning medical care for transgender children was unconstitutional, effectively blocking the state’s policies from being enforced. The law was a priority for GOP Gov. Ron DeSantis.

“Kamala and Tim (Walz) have been at the forefront to protect these issues,” said Golojuch, noting that Walz was a Gay-Straight Alliance faculty adviser, as it was called then, supporting LGBTQ+ high school students as early as the 1990s.

Two other key issues for Hawaii, which are often intertwined, are energy and the environment. Hawaii Democratic Party Vice Chair Mina Morita was chair of the Hawaii House Energy and Environmental Protection Committee and later served as commissioner of the state Public Utilities Commission. The Maui fires, she said, showed just how vulnerable Hawaii is to climate change and disruption of its utilities.

“I think it’s really important that there’s a continuation in the Biden policies in making transitions to an electricity-based transportation system and to minimize carbon emissions,” she said Wednesday. “There is also this whole transition into a different century of energy use and to a modernized electric utility.”

In the Legislature Morita played a key role in developing the Hawaii Clean Energy Initiative to achieve 100% clean energy by 2045. She notes that its enactment was backed by a Republican governor, Linda Lingle.

If Harris wins in November, Morita said, “We can be assured that we have a partnership with the U.S. Department of Energy and all of the national labs and continue with the Hawaii clean energy agreement that was forged over a decade ago. It was good partnership with the Lingle administration, and Hawaii has kept on that path.”

Harris and Walz also have promised to push for affordable health care, supporters say, pointing to the overhaul of the system that former President Barack Obama signed into law in 2010

“I think both of these individuals have fought in their entire congressional careers to preserve the Affordable Care Act, to make sure that all Americans have access to health care,” said delegate Jacce Mikulanec, a Honolulu medical industry employee who emphasized that he was speaking as an individual. “And I think they will continue under a Harris administration.

Hirono brought up one more issue at her Wednesday morning talk: education. As governor of Minnesota, Walz helped the state provide free lunches for kids, something that Hirono said she has signed on to at the federal level in a bill from U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders.

Walz has also been instrumental in allowing free college tuition for students who qualify. “So he’s my kind of guy,” Hirono said of the vice presidential nominee.

All Democrats are well aware that the 2024 election is far from over, and nearly all expect a close race, as current polls suggest.

At a meeting of the Hawaii and Utah delegation Tuesday in Chicago, U.S. Sen. Brian Schatz reminded his Democratic colleagues of other accomplishments coming out of Washington during the past three and a half years, including greater financial support for Native Hawaiian communities and the recent lowering of drug costs for Medicare.

“It is about continuing the progress,” Schatz said. “It is not about delivering a bunch of accomplishments and then saying, ‘You’re welcome,’ because people are still suffering, because these issues are still burning, because there is still more work to do.”